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Should I clear cheap Sha Crystals?

I know, normally this would be a simple answer. However, I was looking at my market today, and realized that the price of Sha Crystals has started to dip quite a bit, while Essence/Dust/Shards from MoP stay the same. I first noticed how bad the price for Crystals were when I was D/E'ing to get mats below market, and noticed that our Sha Crystals are worth about 180g each right now, with a slow incline from undercuts back up to about 220-250g each. With prices this low, it's not even worth it to use my Daily CD, if I'm only doing it to avoid buying them outright. It costs 210-225g to make a Crystal, which sucks. However, I was thinking of trying to reset, when I noticed that there are approx. 145 Crystals on the AH, and it would cost around 19k for me to push the price back up to over 210g, so I'm not sure if it's worth it. However, with the question of the cheap ones, and a patch coming up, what should be my cutoff for buying them? I think it's safe to assume that there will be a bubble in the weeks following the patch, and prices of all the mats will increase. Would you clear it out, or just buy all below a certain price (i.e., 190g)? Thoughts on anything else?

I actually tried to push them up a week or so ago and it made no dent... the moment I did another 200 showed up within a couple hours.
on an upside i have blown threw the crystals in enchants fairly quick. The volume on sales is definitely a safety net for these types of endeavors.
It helps I camp post the enchants and gems in order to clear stock though. I am just too lazy to actually play the game on most work nights, lol.

Yeah, I don't think it will be worth the risk, as if things stay the way they are currently, in regards to patch 5.4, the new tailoring pvp gear, may create a new very cheap way to create sha crystals. So I would wait to see how that pans out before assuming there will be a bubble in prices for sha crystals.

The Undermine Journal is a good option to check if prices are dropping. The graphs on the realm pages are often very chaotic, but the global page for an item is usually a really good way to find the trend of items.

As you can see the prices for Sha Crystals are definitely dropping, but they aren't dropping at an alarming pace at all. There even have been periods that the prices have been dropping way more rapidly.

I wouldn't try to push prices back up though, you wouldn't be fighting a realm-wide trend (like resetting glyph prices), but you would be fighting a global trend. There's nothing wrong with stockpiling cheap Sha Crystals though, but I would watch out with making your stockpile too large as prices are still dropping.

Epic quality patterns require a very high volume of cloth/leather/metal so don't represent a cheap Sha Crystal source.

Granted, the PTR can change at any moment. In any case, the Sha Crystal market is trending downward pretty consistently so while I wouldn't try to clear them out to reset prices, I also wouldn't hesitate to sink a few thousand gold into turning Sha Crystals into enchanting scrolls to have on hand for the patch. Even if the raw crystal value continues to drop a bit, the scrolls should still be quite profitable (with the usual caveat to be familiar with your server's particular enchanting market before making a decision).

Sorry I haven't been able to check in guys, been on a plane, and the hotel I was at didn't have WiFi - oddest thing I have ever seen in my life, as it wasn't even cheap XD. But moving on!

@Tristan It's great to see someone else from my realm has attempted to reset the prices, but disappointing at the same time. I've noticed some of those same trends you pointed at, with the guy selling the x20 for 4k. I hate to see it dropping so low, that my CD isn't even worth it XD. But, I've been snagging up the cheap ones as they come, as I'm sure the rest of you have been as well. Good luck on those Enchant sales!

@GoblinRaset That's a good point, and even if the crystals don't bubble, I'm sure the enchants will. Regardless of whether or not either one bubbles, even if they stay same price, there's no reason to not buy the cheap ones and craft enchants, so I just keep buying at all below certain prices. That way I'm increasing stock, but not to the point of not being able to use them.

@Mithrildar Thanks, I actually never even considered looking at items on the global page to look at general trends. I was always just looking at WoWuction or TUJ Realm histories, and watching them from there. Like you said, they can be kind of crazy. Also, I know what you mean about fighting a realm-wide trend. I was experimenting with some gems, and successfully managed to reset some of the gems (where they were ~15-20g and falling, I reset to full 150g each and they're still holding around ~90g over the past week, and my reset was 3 weeks ago), but some ( in particular) was just an awful mistake. I would reset, then the majority of people would undercut by half the price over and over, pushing it back down within the same day. Luckily the few sales I made were enough to cover the cost of resetting, but now I'm stuck with these stacks of gems that have crashed below 10g per again. Awful, but at least I covered my deposits broke even - if I wanted to straight give up, I could vendor all those extras, but that would be stupid IMO. I just put them out and hope to get rid of them eventually.

@Caitlyn That's basically what I've decided to do, and it's working out well for the most part. Thanks for the advice!

@TheExile , reseting gem prices can be hard depending on your realm. In my realm, it's so hard to reset them. It's so easy however, to lower them to destroy the market. So gratz on making a nice reset :P But yeah, if you had learned a bit, trying to reset 'blue' gems is kind of a mistake, mostly always - peoples minds are already set to those bad prices an they don't sell that well also, except for spirit ones.

PS: Working on the guide, adding some photoshop to make it look bettah aw yea